Bring Us Your Videos Yearning to Be Art

Friday

Jul 23, 2010 at 5:16 AM

The jury selecting work for the video biennial YouTube Play is a group of international, multidisciplinary artists including Laurie Anderson and Takashi Murakami.

The jury selecting the 20 videos for YouTube Play, the video biennial in October that is the brainchild of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube, has been finally been chosen. And it includes recognizable names in the fields of art, music, film and video.

Last month the Guggenheim and YouTube announced they would inaugurate the event, in collaboration with HP and Intel and invited members of the public — whether they consider themselves artists or not — to post videos made within the last two years on a special Web site, youtube.com/play.

Judging the submissions will be Takashi Murakami, Ryan McGinley, Douglas Gordon, Marilyn Minter and Shirin Neshat, artists known for their work in a variety of mediums; Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer; Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, musician and filmmaker; the music group Animal Collective; and the filmmakers Darren Aronofsky and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“I felt it was important that the jury be international and multidisciplinary,” said Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, who is the heading the jury.

The winning entries will be shown at all the Guggenheim’s international branches — as well as on the YouTube Play channel.

The Web site has received about 6,600 submissions so far. The deadline is July 31.

Gerhard Richter may be known for his dreamy photo-based paintings and colorful abstract canvases, but he has also created a large body of works on paper. Though rarely seen, these works offer an important peek into his art-making process.

On and off throughout his career Mr. Richter has used pencil, paper, crayon and watercolors not simply as a way of thinking through a painting but also as creations that stand on their own. “He disavows drawings, but then he continues to draw,” said Brett Littman, executive director of the Drawing Center.

Last year, on a trip to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in Britain, Mr. Littman saw a survey of Mr. Richter’s drawings. Mr. Littman was so taken with them that he asked Gavin Delahunty, the curator at Middlesbrough, if he would bring a version of the exhibition to the Drawing Center. It will be the first time a show of just Mr. Richter’s works on paper will be seen in the United States.

“Gerhard Richter: Lines Which Do Not Exist,” on view from Sept. 11 through Nov. 18, will include more than 50 works from public and private collections including five on loan from the Museum of Modern Art here as well as from the Art Institute of Chicago. The rest of the show is made up of loans from Europe as well as nine from Mr. Richter.

Many of these works stand on their own and do not relate to specific paintings. “He uses drawings as a way to experiment, to think about perception and form,” Mr. Littman said. “And the more you start looking at them, the more you see different kinds of ideas.”

In his landscape drawings, as in his paintings, he often begins with a photo but usually takes the images in a more free-hand direction. He also has made a series of “drill drawings,” for which he inserts a pencil into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns, thus divorcing the hand of the artist from the work of art.

Rather than hang works in chronological order, Mr. Littman said he would prop the drawings on shelves to provide, as he explained, “a more flexible reading of Richter’s work.”

A little over a year ago the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it had completed a major round of layoffs (74 employees) and voluntary retirements (95). Now it is slowly starting to rebuild. This week it announced three curatorial appointments:

Xavier Salomon, chief curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, will become a curator of European paintings in January. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, chief curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, is coming to the Met in September as a painting curator in the American Wing. Jennifer Perry, associate conservator for Asian paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, will join on Sept. 13 as the conservator for Japanese paintings.

“Despite the unprecedented challenges presented by the economic recession, it is our top priority to retain the most talented people in their fields,” said Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, who explained that the appointments filled vacancies created by retirements or recent promotions.

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